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The Italian-born cinematographer Dante Spinotti has had a remarkable Hollywood career, working with directors such as Paul Schrader, Barry Levinson, and Sam Raimi, and most notably forming a close collaboration with Michael Mann. He shot “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Heat”—two Mann classics—before garnering an Oscar nomination for Mann’s “The Insider.” (He was also nominated for Curtis Hanson’s gorgeous noir, “L.A. Confidential.”)

Spinotti has maintained another close collaboration, with Brett Ratner, the director behind the “Rush Hour” franchise of action comedies. Spinotti worked with Ratner on movies such as “Red Dragon” and “X-Men: The Last Stand.” Ratner’s career seemed to have come to an end in 2017, after he was accused by at least ten women of sexual misconduct. The actress Natasha Henstridge said that Ratner forced her to perform oral sex; the actress Olivia Munn said that Ratner masturbated in front of her in his trailer and later told her that he ejaculated on magazine covers featuring her image; the model Keri Claussen Khalighi said that when she was seventeen, she was sexually assaulted by Russell Simmons while Ratner watched. (Ratner has denied all the accusations; Simmons, who has been accused of misconduct by multiple women, said that the encounter was consensual.)

Ratner was recently selected by the Trump family to direct the new documentary “Melania,” which was financed by Amazon and is currently playing in theatres across the country. The film has been screened at the White House, with Tim Cook and Mike Tyson in attendance, and at the recently renamed Trump Kennedy Center. Spinotti is one of the film’s three cinematographers; he told the Times, of the experience, that it was “nice to see Brett being his old self.” (Despite awful reviews, the film grossed an estimated seven million dollars in its first weekend, the best opening weekend for a documentary in more than a decade.)

Spinotti and I recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his movies, his affection for Ratner, and why he wanted to get involved in making “Melania.”

How did you get involved with “Melania”?

The director. I’ve done many films with Brett Ratner in the past, so he called me. In fact, I was not available because I had something to do, but he was accommodating. And, of course, I was so curious to see the President going into power and Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago. Plus, we flew on Air Force One. Curiosity was really what led me into this, and a certain friendship with Brett that has gone on for a long time.

What did you make of the President and Melania? And what’s different about filming a movie in the White House or on Air Force One?

Well, the film we were doing was actually a documentary. The organization was highly impressive because, on Inauguration Day, we had something like twelve crews all around town. Once they were set in position, they could not move. I was the person in the White House. I was waiting for the President and Melania to come back at the end of the day. It was kind of interesting. How else do you have the occasion to see the center of power? Don’t ask me about my political opinions of the President, because I’d rather not answer.

But do you feel like you learned anything about the President that maybe people who have never seen him up close don’t know, or don’t understand?

Well, I would say, if I learned anything, it was in a very superficial way. My curiosity was to see the center of power and the White House, which is a beautiful place. Also, it was interesting to figure out how to photograph Melania. Photographing human faces is always really interesting, especially female faces. The key is not so much about beauty photography. It’s about making sure that you take away distracting elements from a face. When you take away distracting elements from a face, you can let the original beauty of the person come out and reveal itself and become interesting.

So you take out the distracting elements?

If you light the face, yes. If someone has an irregularity or something destructive, it takes away from the natural beauty, from the interest of a human face. You take the distracting element away, and now the face reveals itself for what it is. And it becomes interesting for the viewer. Beautiful, and interesting for the viewer.

There have been some critiques of the movie. People have said that it was essentially a payoff from Amazon to the White House, and that you’re doing propaganda for an authoritarian President. I know you said you don’t want to get into politics, but what do you think of that critique?

Well, you know, I felt like I was a reporter.

I see.

You see what I mean?

Sure.

It’s, like, would you do an interview with Melania or President Trump yourself? Probably yes. It doesn’t mean that you think the same way or that you approve of him doing what he’s doing.

You and I are two journalists talking, essentially.

Yeah. So, I mean, to me, the experience was about, yes, being a reporter—being a cinematographer in a documentary, and doing my best to make Melania look visually beautiful with the lighting.

One thing reporters try to do is to spotlight ideas or news stories, and what you’re trying to do is spotlight her face and its beauty. I do see a real similarity there.

Yeah. We were trying to do the best we could. Again, as I told you, I was the guy with a camera, with a couple of assistants in the Trumps’ apartment when they came back to the White House at night. So there’s an interview with Melania at that point, and we organized the lights in the best possible way.

It’s important to make them look as good as possible, too. That’s part of your job, or our job.

It’s not about making them look as good as possible. It is about making them look as they are without having anything that is distinctively not nice or proper.

Do you know—

Also, it was a great pleasure for me to work with Brett again, because I did movies years ago with Brett.

Well, he’s been down on his luck a little bit lately, so that was nice of you to give him some help.

And I always felt that as you do a movie with somebody, you’re very intimate with this person.

Brett Ratner, you are talking about?

Yeah. Not the intimacy level of when you go out with a girl. But, you’re close. It’s like a family. You live twenty-four hours with someone shooting a movie. So I know Brett very well, and I know he is a very good, generous soul.

Aw.

He’s not an aggressive person.

I have read different things.

He is not an aggressive person, so I was very happy to see him being happy again, to be able to work, because he’s been without work for a few years, which I think is kind of unjust. It makes no sense to me, knowing Brett very well.

I know you’ve said that Brett’s been “frustrated” these past eight years, and there were all these accusations against him—that he forced women to perform sex acts, that he masturbated in front of women, all these things. So you didn’t believe them, or you weren’t concerned about them?

Well, I don’t know. I was not present. What I can tell you is that Brett might have made some mistakes, but his character is very gentle—he is a very gentle, generous person, always kind to everybody in the crew, men or women, always very respectable. So that’s why I wanted to go back and help him, because I felt that what happened to him was kind of unjust.

So is that because you don’t believe the accusations, or because you think that it’s time to move on?

I don’t know. I’m not informed about the accusations. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t present, but I know his personality. I know his character. I can’t tell because I wasn’t there, and he might’ve made some mistakes, but he’s a very good guy at heart. He’s a very generous and human kind of person.

You told the Times that Brett “made some mistakes.” Has he told you that he made mistakes?

No. No. No. Isaac, no. All I’m saying is that I worked with him twelve hours, fifteen hours, a day, and then everybody went their own way. Our age difference is wide. I could be his father.

I read that Roman Polanski is a father figure to him. So that role might already be filled. There are a lot of people who feel affection for Brett.

Yeah, yeah. Because he’s a good kid. [In 2007’s Paris-based “Rush Hour 3,” Ratner gave a cameo to Polanski, who had fled to France after being accused of anally and vaginally raping a thirteen-year-old. He was later accused of sexually assaulting other teen-agers, which he denies. In the cameo, Polanski has a comic scene where he prepares to do an anal-cavity search of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.]

The Times has you saying that he made some mistakes. That’s what I was curious about.

What I’m saying is, he might’ve made some mistakes. I don’t know. It’s not like I was with him when he was interviewing actresses to do a movie or that kind of activity.

It’s the same with Trump. A lot of accusations have been made against him, but neither you nor I were in the room. So who’s to say, really?

Yeah, exactly.

What do you think “Melania” accomplishes? Why do you think it’s an important movie?

You’ll have to answer that question yourself. My interest in the project was to shoot, to see the location, to meet these people, to work with Brett. I couldn’t give you an answer like that. You should probably ask people who know marketing better.

I didn’t mean in terms of marketing. I meant artistically.

I think it’s a movie that is very well executed. The music is splendid, and it was shot in a very interesting way. It was treated very carefully, finished with great precision and accuracy. But I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how to judge that film.

“Triumph of the Will” is very controversial, but you can’t deny that as a piece of filmmaking it is a very impressive achievement. You can like something without agreeing with its politics.

Yes, probably so. I might’ve liked if the film could have been a little more about her activities and achievements, which are described in the end titles. But, also, our operation was limited to twenty days, and to two or three days after Donald went into the White House. Maybe it would’ve been more interesting if it was really about what she’s done as First Lady.

Are you going to do “Heat 2”?

No, I’m not. I think I probably interrupted my collaboration with Michael Mann.

Why?

I don’t know. It’s one of those things. I did five movies with Michael, and sometimes with these things, for some reason, you get interrupted. The last one I did was with the actor in Chicago.

“Public Enemies”?

“Public Enemies.” Yes, that’s right. It would be too complex to explain to you now.

If you’re not doing “Heat 2,” there’s maybe room for “Melania 2” at some point, with more focus on her achievements.

Yeah, we’ll see about that. ♦

In Brooklyn, there’s a one-hundred-and-sixty-two-year-old building that stands at 40 Greene Avenue. For much of its life, the structure was a Catholic church, known as St. Casimir’s. But in 1980 it was purchased and renovated by Dr. Josephine English. English, the first Black woman to open a private practice in the state of New York, was known as Brooklyn’s Birth Mother. She had delivered some six thousand babies, including the children of Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X. She became a philanthropist, and her patronage of the arts was perhaps best represented by her conversion of St. Casimir’s into a haven for theatre, performance, and community engagement. She named the venue after the actor, singer, sportsman, and activist Paul Robeson, who decades earlier had been one of the most respected and beloved Black men in the world, until he was deemed an enemy of the state, in 1950.

English died in 2011, and the theatre shuttered. The building would undergo a restoration, in 2017, but in that intervening period the inanimate structure seemed actually dead. Scaffolding was put up, throttling the full view of the building’s neglected façade, except for that gilded, periwinkle sign: “The Paul Robeson Theatre”—a gesture of reclamation, snuffed.

Americans of English’s generation would have known Robeson as well as they knew Lincoln. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, he was the son of the Reverend William Drew Robeson, who had been born enslaved and had self-liberated via the Underground Railroad. The handsome preacher’s son, standing at six feet three inches, became famous by playing college football at Rutgers, where he won first-team All-American honors two years in a row. But the sports world hoarded the glory of Robey for only so long. There was his subsequent slaying of the academy: becoming valedictorian at Rutgers, receiving a law degree from Columbia University. And then came his domination of the stage and of song, as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” as the Moor in “Othello,” and as the caretaker and ennobler of Negro spirituals. The baritone etched himself in the national songbook as the translator of the irreducible dark and comely consciousness.

How Robeson, and his voice, came to espouse an uncensored radical socialism, and how a persecutory Cold War campaign would ultimately condemn him as the Negro “enemy within,” are among the preoccupations of “Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America,” a new book by Howard Bryant. Reminiscing on a childhood in Philadelphia, the city where Robeson died in 1976—nearly thirty years after the death of his public persona—Bryant writes, “In our house, Paul Robeson was a disembodied figure, a name without a story.” Bryant, who is Black, is in his late fifties. That Robeson could be defanged and disappeared from the ledger is a matter of cultural and political theft, history-eating. The other preoccupation of the book is to analyze an episode in the long campaign against Robeson, which Bryant mounts as a critical psychic injury in the annals of Black celebrity: the baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s uneasy decision to testify against Robeson in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

The narrative that increasingly takes shape, in our minds, as we read “Kings and Pawns” is that of a fratricide—one that is particularly captivating, because the “brothers” in question did not meet at any point during the overlapping course of their two extraordinary lives. But it’s us, the appalled readers, who are doing most of that projecting, and imposing on this story the logic of a modern-day pop-culture feud. Bryant is a restrained writer, and the fastidiousness of his elastic text does little to allay those who are likely to become inflamed. (Hence the reels on Instagram of readers, including a well-known pastor, damning Robinson and his icon status to hell.) Again and again, Bryant invokes the Duboisian concept of the Black American’s obligation, a double consciousness—he uses “twoness”—to temper his portrait of Robinson, whose actions and blinkered politics bring him dangerously close to the contemporary idea of a sellout. In the preface, as Bryant prepares to present his findings to the reader, he deviates from the typical researcher’s pose of humble gratification; rather, he seems a little cowed. He is a serious and engaging sportswriter who has published eleven books, many of them fuelled by his ambition to disturb the stubborn and déclassé jingoism that still sustains the subject he loves—baseball, the American game. He leans on a labored metaphor here:

Through countless published biographies over several decades, Robinson’s 1949 testimony against Robeson on Capitol Hill had long sat in plain sight, explored in only a page or two or usually by a single sentence—Jackie Robinson testified against Paul Robeson—an exposed root on the beaten path of the story of baseball integration.

The “root” grabs and tugs Bryant down into a swamp of disinformation, hero worship, groupthink, xenophobia, daddy issues, and dark bargaining. The book is a little like a thriller, following Bryant as he lances a Red Scare factoid, which spills out on him its substance.

The year is 1949. Robinson, the first Black athlete to be signed by a major-league baseball team, is in his second year playing for the now integrated Brooklyn Dodgers. At Ebbets Field, on July 12th, whatever residual uncertainty there was of Robinson’s dominance is vanquished at the All-Star Game, the first to have Black players in the lineup. Robinson is on the National League team, which makes some fatal mistakes, losing badly, but he soars above that atmosphere of blunder, giving a perfect performance as second baseman.

Six days later, he gives another performance, in Washington, D.C., in Room 226 of the Old House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Senator John Wood, of Ku Klux Klan progeny, then shepherd of the HUAC, had invited him to testify about the “communist infiltration of minority groups,” seemingly evidenced by the interest that Black American figures had demonstrated in the Soviet Union, which had championed racial equality. “The appeal of the Soviet Union to Black Americans could be best seen not through the convoluted rubric of U.S.-Soviet foreign relations, but rather through the political disenfranchisement, daily hardships, and violence of Black life in the United States,” Bryant writes. In the thirties, a cadre of Black artists, including the poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, had been welcomed by the Soviets. But it was no longer the thirties, and the exigency of Negro loyalty had everyone spooked.

Robinson is an “unenthusiastic” witness, Bryant relays, appearing before the committee, which has by then burnished its persecution tactics on “subversives” in Hollywood and beyond. His testimony is a divided text, serving a few different masters, according to Bryant. Having consulted with his wife, Rachel, Robinson tries to moderate the hotheadedness of the committee, citing the Negro plight: “Just because communists kick up a big fuss over racial discrimination when it suits their purposes, a lot of people try to pretend that the whole issue is a creation of the communist imagination.” But this is not the substance of the speech that sticks. It’s his comments about Robeson that would draw headlines. In April, while Robeson, a global star, was on his way to a concert in Russia, he had attended a convention of leftists in Paris. He had sung “Joe Hill”—the protest song about the eponymous laborer, songwriter, and communist, who was accused of murder in 1914, and executed in Utah the following year. Robeson had also given a speech in Paris condemning the arms race. “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has lifted our people to full dignity,” Robeson reportedly said, according to the Associated Press—a statement that was twisted in the media as an insurrectionary call to Negroes back home. When the HUAC asks Robinson about these remarks, he hedges: if Robeson did make those comments, well, then, “it sounds very silly to me.”

“Silly”—no doubt a Robinson word. If he is an elocutionist, then he is an elocutionist of the unaffected. He would go on to say that Robeson “has a right to his personal views, and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that’s his business and not mine. He’s still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer and actor.” But the testimony doesn’t end there. Later, Robinson declares that Negroes have invested too much in the country’s welfare to “throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass”—a shock of hostile poetry in the testimony. Bryant believes that Robinson did not craft this phrase himself. The writer argues that it has the fingerprints of Robinson’s manager, Branch Rickey, all over it. In the standard Robinson myth of interracial union, Rickey is the progressive innovator—the manager who took the player under his wing and broke the color line of the game. That’s oversimplifying things, Bryant counters. Rickey was also an opportunist and a manipulator; in other words, he was the father figure. A hard-nosed nationalist, and an acquisitive evangelist, he had stock in the expulsion of the anti-imperialists, including Robeson. “Siren song sung in bass,” Bryant argues, could not have been written by anyone but Rickey. The torque of it points to the intensity of his obsession. It is also the phrase that cements Robeson’s fate.

Why would Robinson go along with it? In “Kings and Pawns,” Bryant probes the “dormant Black history” of postwar machinations, overshadowed in our collective consciousness by the sheer momentum of the civil-rights movement. Robinson would have seen himself as a combatant (he was a veteran, and did experience the special mistreatment of the Black soldier) in what was known in the Black press as the “Double V” campaign, meaning the defeat of fascism abroad and of racism at home. This bias toward the future, even at the expense of would-be allies like Robeson—this is why a 2019 article in The Nation frighteningly misrepresents Robinson’s testimony, a moment of a political voice being compromised, as moving, a precursor to the rebellion of Colin Kaepernick against the N.F.L.

Although Robinson’s testimony is the central sin in “Kings and Pawns,” Bryant details the coöperation of many institutions in the plot against Robeson during the Red Scare. The passage of the McCarran Act, in 1950, fervently championed by liberals and conservatives alike, codified the government’s blacklist. The N.A.A.C.P. broke ties with Robeson, who had won the organization’s Spingarn Award for outstanding achievement, and removed him from its list of award winners. (You can still find contemporary sources that cite, in a bit of irony, that it was Robinson who was the first athlete to receive the award. He was the second.) Rutgers Athletics, too, removed Robeson from its records. Langston Hughes, facing his own accusations of communism from the HUAC, “sacrificed Robeson to save himself,” Bryant writes, “removing Robeson’s name from three of his popular children’s volumes on influential Black Americans .” Robeson’s annual income dwindled to almost nothing. A concert at Peekskill in upstate New York drew violent stoning by the K.K.K., not once but twice, and the Democratic establishment blamed Robeson for the attacks, whose perpetrators were never prosecuted. Like DuBois, Robeson’s passport was ultimately revoked, amounting to a kind of imprisonment, Bryant writes.

Much of “Kings and Pawns” rewinds from 1949 to evidence that Robinson and Robeson shared a parallel arc. This brings the note of tragic kingship. “Like Robinson,” or “like Robeson,” is a construction that recurs. Each man’s extraordinary prowess lifts them, in the public imagination, above the rest of their race, a real problem, because it is isolating. As athletes, both men endure hazing: both bodies take pummelling and injury and humiliation. As public figures, both face the necessity of public speechifying, which Robeson takes to naturally and which Robinson does not, exactly. There is a premonitory moment, too, in this book that wrings so much drama from so many backdoor meetings. In 1943, Robeson, alongside the owners of the major-league baseball teams, had met with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner, though the substance of the meeting was not made public; the minutes were kept by the commissioner’s office. Bryant writes that, during the meeting, which had been convened to push Landis to integrate the sport, Robeson had testified. His national esteem would have been key to paving a path for Robinson.

Robinson, who, in his later years, expressed tenuous regret over the HUAC testimony, is a pained figure in the book. He had pledged fidelity, and felt responsibility to his country, but wasn’t he the citizen of two nations, Black America and the States? The end of his life is a story of unremarkable middle-class comforts amid an aura of disillusionment. He retires because his body fails; biology did not abide by the march of integration, its slowness. He parts ways with the Republican Party he had so doggedly believed was the path forward for the Negro cause. Malcolm X memorably admonishes him for his part in the campaign against Robeson, his willingness to be “sicced” against the exemplar that the people had. His son goes to Vietnam and comes back addicted to drugs. Robinson’s death, before the legend was smoothed, even needed some rehabilitating from the Black Panthers, who eulogize him tellingly, as a product of his time. One of the last announcements from Robinson, now having lived through the slaying of the civil-rights movement’s great men, was his decision to refuse to stand for the flag—a weary last gasp, rather than the revisionist interpretation as an act of rebellion, his optimism worn down by consistent betrayal.

Robeson did not testify at the HUAC until seven years after Robinson, and his appearance is withheld for some time in the book. Repeatedly, he is grilled about his allegiance to the Communist Party, and, repeatedly, Robeson is taunting in his invocation of the Fifth Amendment, his refusal to entertain what he saw as authoritarianism, trussed in loyalty-oath questioning. To question why Robeson did not submit to the question of whether he had disavowed the totalitarianism of Stalin is to misapprehend the game the committee was playing. He excoriates his inquisitors, including committee members Richard Arens and Gordon Scherer among them, castigating them as seditious and alien: “You are the Un-Americans.” Robeson, the champion of the underclass, as “the tallest tree in the forest,” is the felled and vindicated hero of the book. The word to affix to “Kings and Pawns” is timely. Bryant, our guide, sometimes pauses his autopsy to do mirroring—that xenophobic panic following 9/11, for example, is an extension of Red Scare propaganda against the “enemy within”—or to outline the chaotic repressiveness of the Trump Administration as McCarthyism redux. It is up to the reader to gauge for herself whether Americanness is a credo she thinks is worth saving. ♦

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Molly Aitken reads her story “This Is How It Happens,” from the February 9, 2026, issue of the magazine. Aitken is the author of two novels, “The Island Child,” from 2020, and “Bright I Burn,” which was published in 2024. She won the 2023 Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction.

It is a Wednesday or a Tuesday, just one of those nondescript midweek days in February when all you have to look forward to is a weekend spent in bed attempting to stroke your feral cat. It is 1982. At least this you are sure of. You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning’s downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents’ house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone. There you will find, no doubt, a cold potato salad gifted by a kind neighbor, the lingering smell of pipe smoke in the hall, and a delighted expression on the dog’s face when your father opens the front door. You walk slowly, looking down at your sodden loafers, and so it is her toes you see first, bare against the gray slabs of the Edinburgh street, each nail painted orange. She is wearing an orange skirt, and an orange jumper, too. Behind her, there are four more people, all dressed in various shades of orange. Their ages range from about twenty-five to sixty, and yet their faces remind you of the youthful hilarity and sweetness of a school photo: all snaggleteeth, mad hair, and crooked glasses.

The barefoot one darts forward and drops a wet leaflet into one of your shopping bags. She is around your age, the youngest of them. Despite the rain, her neck is grimy. You imagine getting a soapy rag and scrubbing at her.

“Nice mustache,” she says. And then, “Anything good in there?” She is pointing at your shopping bags.

Cream cheese. Wine. A bunch of excessively perky daffodils you bought for your father.

Already she has turned back to the others: the man with a dark beard and a hunter’s eyes; the woman in her fifties with dank gray hair; the young man with a shaved head who keeps whispering to the others; and the tanned, ageless one.

Now the man with the beard and the eyes approaches you.

“Come back with us.” He holds out his hand. You want to take it, but your hands are flaking with eczema so, instead, you pass him a shopping bag, realizing too late that, in doing so, you have accepted that you will now either lose your shopping or follow it home with him.

Their place is a typical New Town flat: soaring ceilings and peeling floral fifties wallpaper. It is so similar to the wallpaper in your father’s home that at first your instinct is to run. The barefoot girl, who calls herself Ma, takes your bag from the bearded man, and holds out her free hand for the shopping you are still clutching. You give it to her and watch as she tosses your father’s daffodils into the kitchen sink. She crows over the tins of tuna.

“Four!”

Back at your flat, your cat will be yowling for those tins, but you try not to think about him. There are two people here who weren’t on the street. They look a little younger than you and Ma. You find that you like them. Ma puts the red wine to one side, ignores the shortbread, and scoops a glob of cream cheese onto her fingertip. You copy her and she laughs.

“Be yourself,” she says.

She’s one of those rare things: a woman who is not nice.

The others are hurriedly opening your food. They eat it without thanking you. The one with the beard and the eyes says that his name is Jitendra. You wait for him to ask your name, but he doesn’t. He complains that the wine isn’t white. You apologize and he nods, pours himself a large glass anyway, and tells you that you are handsome.

You sit beside Ma on the floor, clutching a mug of tea. You won’t drink it. The milk is off—you could tell when she poured it. Silk scarves have been thrown over the many lampshades, and a candle is burning low on a coffee table. The whole place is a fire hazard. The air has that sickening smell of dried fruit. It reminds you of the long car journeys you used to take as a child, your parents’ arguments and silences, your father quietly leaving the holiday home in the night, your mother laughing, then crying, then forgetting to cook dinner, so you ate bread and apples and befriended a stray sheep.

Ma strides about the room, waving incense. You want to laugh. You think about what it would be like to kiss her. You feel that you have kissed too few people in your twenty-six years. That time in the work tearoom when a girl pressed her dry mouth to yours and bluntly professed her love—you mumbled words of thanks and scurried off to an early lunch. You knew that she was the type of girl you were meant to take home. Your father would have congratulated you on her looks. Your mother would have complained about how ordinary she was and made your visits difficult. You knew you did not have the stamina for her. She would want things from you.

You take a few inexpert drags on the spliff that Jitendra passes to you. They all start chanting. You are too self-conscious to join in. You can’t help but watch Jitendra. He looks a little like you, except that he has dark hair, hair that makes you think about the comb in your pocket. He sits cross-legged, and he sways, easeful, relaxed. You are not like him at all. The ageless one and a young man with glasses leave for an adjoining bedroom and have sex quietly, but not quietly enough. The others chant for a full hour. Toward the end of that hour, you stop checking your watch and find that you are swaying slightly, that the chant is reverberating in you, even in your feet.

It was probably two months ago that you went alone to the cinema to watch that documentary. You assume that these new acquaintances are part of the same group, because the people in the documentary also wore orange, when they wore any clothes at all. You remember sitting beside the others in the cinema, so rigid and repulsed and turned on.

They stop chanting to eat crackers, and eventually to sleep. You lie down on one of two sofas, and to your surprise you feel comfortable. Ma crawls toward you and plants her palms on your cheeks. Her mouth tastes foul.

Sunrise reveals cobwebs everywhere. You have slept. Right now your cat is probably shredding your bedspread in a ravenous rage. It is time to leave. Jitendra and one of the young ones are up and dressed as if they have jobs to get to, like you; Jitendra even wears a navy suit. He tells you that he is a doctor. You consider asking him to pay you back for your groceries, but don’t. You tell Ma your address, but don’t expect her to remember it, never mind to actually brave the streets of Leith, with the junkies and prostitutes. You chose your flat because it was affordable, and because, up until the age of nineteen, when you moved out of your parents’ house, nothing much had happened to you. At your office, you shuffle papers, send a fax, make tea, open another packet of biscuits, and hand them out. Everyone smiles without quite meeting your gaze, and you realize that you can’t describe in any detail what your colleagues look like—not even the girl who kissed you in the tearoom.

After work, you walk over to your father’s house to apologize for not appearing the night before. The garden is a soup of mud and trampled grass. As you expected, he isn’t there, so you leave a note saying, “Tea at Jenners on Sunday. 11:30.”

That evening, Ma coos to your cat. She finds it creepy that you left the plastic cover on your sofa. She says that your flat is oppressive, that she feels unwelcome in the kitchen, but you notice that she feels comfortable enough to empty your fridge, eating what she can and putting the rest in a plastic bag to take away with her.

You ask her what her childhood was like.

“Normal. Why?”

You imagine that she had three older brothers and they were all violent.

You meet your father for that tea in Jenners. He looks like himself, clipped mustache, tweed suit, a smoker’s fingernails. He does not shake your hand. Immediately, he begins a monologue about your dead mother: how she hated him when they first met (and on many occasions after they married), what a good lover she was, how irrational she was, how much he adored her. You try to avoid eye contact with the other customers. Your neck feels hot, and you hate that your father has this effect on your body.

“We were like a pair of kittens, climbing all over each other,” he says.

You know you will carry this horrifying image with you for the rest of your life.

“Your shirt is very orange,” he notes, putting his tea down, but he goes straight back to the subject of your mother, and you press the crumbs from your scone into the pad of your finger.

You have sex with Ma without kissing her mouth. She doesn’t mention the eczema all over your body. She is wearing an orange silk slip, a dicey choice for February, especially as you keep a fire going only in the little sitting room, because that’s where you and the cat spend most of your time. She tells you that the slip was her grandmother’s and that she made the dye from tree bark she stole from the Royal Botanic Garden. Over the next few weeks, she starts dyeing your white clothes, too, and one day all your dark suits have vanished. You find your best black slacks in a charity shop at the top of Leith Walk and have to repurchase them at an embarrassingly low price.

Ma has told you that she’s “with” Jitendra. You have come to like him. Her Indian name, Ma Maryam, like Jitendra’s, was given to her by the guru. She refuses to tell you the name on her passport. She says that she will change it legally as soon as she has the cash. Perhaps Ma is a student or a trainee something, like most of the others. You haven’t asked.

Jitendra gives you answers to all your questions. A few times, he massages your shoulders as he speaks to you, and you notice that you feel loose, relaxed even, around him. With him you talk, and with Ma you have quite ordinary sex.

You stay at their flat more and more, stopping at home just to feed your cat. In the mornings, before Jitendra goes to his practice and you to the office, you sit with your cups of tea and play draughts. You don’t know exactly when it happens but you find that you are one of them. You haven’t been to the barber in weeks. You have a beard for the first time in your life. You sense that you will soon be let go from work—there have been comments about your wardrobe, and how often you are late—but it doesn’t bother you, even though you know it should. You will have to give up your tiny flat, but you will just move into theirs. It has plenty of room. It will be fine. The only thing that concerns you is your cat. You are not sure how they will treat him. They are careless. No doubt one of them will bring home a plant that’s poisonous for felines. It would be just like them to—on a whim, without checking with you—become indoor-plant people.

One evening, you manage to persuade Ma to get into your bath, because you have seen the state of the bathtub where she lives. She reappears pink and soft and far too young-looking. You realize you prefer her dirty.

Since you started wearing orange, your cat has been treating you with disdain. Sometimes you don’t see him for days. He hisses and spits from under your bed, and you are afraid to get out in the morning because there is no doubt in your mind that he will scratch your bare ankles. You take flying leaps off your mattress, and hurt your knees. Not for the first time, you despair at having somehow chosen a beast that is so vicious—but when you got him, as a kitten, he seemed like all the others.

Your father leaves a message on your answering machine inviting you to a whisky evening. You don’t phone him back.

Out of nowhere, Ma says to your cat, “I used to ignore my father, and now he’s dead.”

It is the most lucid thing she has ever said.

Ma tells you, “We’re leaving you soon,” and you struggle not to cry, because you have not even managed to quit your job and move in with them yet.

Ma does not invite you. Jitendra doesn’t, either, not even when you ask him about it. You had thought the two of you were close. You don’t cry. You get a pint with an old school friend, but that is a mistake because all he wants to talk about is your parents, and how much he misses them, your mother—he is so sorry about your mother. You drink too fast and wake up in the morning on your sofa, your feet bare and covered in scratches.

At your father’s house, the dog tumbles out the door to lick your ankles. Your father looks tired, and you remember that you didn’t go to his whisky evening. You are holding a cardboard box with a few air holes punctured in the top.

“I forgot you had a cat,” he says, “Come in. Come in.”

You follow. The dog bounces near your feet. You reel off your instructions: feed the cat twice a day, never allow him out of the house, don’t attempt to trim his nails—you will regret it.

It’s just two weeks, you tell the cat.

The kitchen is uncannily clean. When you were a child, the place was always in a relentless state of disarray. There were always raised voices of one kind or another, always dirty cups in the sink and random forks on the sofa.

“Holiday, then?” He lights his pipe.

“With some friends.”

You open the flaps of the cardboard box, and the cat streaks out, leaps up onto the kitchen counter, and begins lapping from the dripping tap. It’s as if he had always lived in this house.

“Don’t worry,” your father says, blowing smoke over your head. “I’ll take care of him.”

Oregon: heat ricocheting off solid soil; flies crawling into ears and over toes; stacks of newly planed wood, smelling of sap, ready to build with; warm apples; sex; too much beer; too little rice; filthy children on the verge of killing a butterfly or a mouse.

You are different here. Yes, definitely different. Your Scottish skin is mottled with freckles; the eczema has retreated somewhere, you hope for good. Here you are touched by everyone, skin on skin, almost constantly.

Tonight you are in the meditation hall. You haven’t opened your eyes. You mustn’t, because it would break the magic. No one has used that word with you—magic—but that’s what it is, inexplicable and, at times, terrifying. Despite yourself, you open your eyes, gaze into your lap, and find an erection poking up at you. You wonder whether you can make yourself come without moving, without touch. It feels like an extreme effort to orgasm in this heat. You will let the erection go on, or wither on its own. You have been having sex with so many women. Some who were once lawyers or doctors or scientists. Some younger, like Ma, who were teachers or waitresses or still just daughters when they came here. You have had so much sex that you got a rash—not eczema, it was something else, and you had to leave this place, which you have helped to build, and get a bus to another town to see a doctor who did not know you. To him, you said out loud your new name. It feels like yours now, even though you’d never heard it before your guru presented it to you. You queued, along with many others, just to have a few brief moments with him. You haven’t admitted this to anyone, hardly even to yourself, but you were underwhelmed by the reality of him. Softer, feebler even, than you expected. Nothing like the sharp-eyed creature you saw at a distance.

You think of the evening after you graduated from university. Your father had been drinking at dinner; so had you. You were sitting beside him on the sofa, and then you were getting up to leave, and his arms shot around you and grasped you tight and held on. The next morning, after breakfast, you realized that he had been hugging you.

It’s been almost a year, and you rarely think about your cat now, except when you see the white scars on your tanned feet. You know that some people here have sent postcards home, but you have not. There is no point, really. What would you even say, except to ask after the cat?

You have not seen Jitendra since you arrived. You asked Ma when you first bumped into her again, and she shrugged and said that he’d gone back to his family. Sometimes Ma serves you dinner or sits near you in a circle around a fire on a summer night, but beyond that you barely interact with her. You have not had sex with her once since you got here. Often she is with the children; you know that she uses a damp cloth to wipe their faces and hands, and even sleeps in the house that is meant only for children, regularly bellowing at them to “be gentle.” You can’t help noticing that none of them seem to cut their nails. All of them are covered in scratches at different stages of bleeding or not bleeding. In Scotland, Ma did not seem like the maternal type, but here she is ordinary, mundane even. She blends in. You, on the other hand, you are so beautiful now. Your body is bigger; you take up more space. Your skin is smooth, except for the calluses on your hands from sawing wood. Everyone loves you here. Most days you are pretty sure of that. Everyone touches you all the time. For the first time in your life, you experience long, intimate hugs with other men, men who have no interest in fucking you; you have no interest in fucking them, either. But you slap each other’s shoulders after building a new chicken coop. They also wrap their arms around you after meditation. A man kissed you on both cheeks when you woke up shouting one night. At first, it was bizarre and glorious, but now the feeling of this love has become comfortable, lived-in. You are so deeply proud of all of them, and they are proud of you. What you are all doing here is extraordinary. You find yourself reaching for them, too, embracing them, telling them you love them. You find yourself looking up at the sky constantly, even when the sun is blinding.

One evening, you tell a group of children about the pet sheep you briefly had on holiday as a child. A tiny boy pulls your sleeve and says that he wants a sheep. You have no idea where to buy a sheep in Oregon. You don’t tell them about your cat. They don’t seem old enough somehow. You take to rolling the youngest children in blankets and carrying them around over one shoulder. You sense a ravenous need in them to be held. Even some of the older children beg you for a turn, so you enlist other men to help you. You see the brief joy on their grimy faces afterward and wonder if any children have run away from here. You ask yourself who would look for them, if they did, and if they would ever be found. You want to meditate, to empty yourself again. But then the next child comes to you, and says, “Please, big man, hold me.”

It’s morning. You haven’t slept, but you’re not sure why. The light is red and the trees purple; the tarmac is warm beneath your bare feet.

You haven’t spoken to Ma in months, but she’s running toward you, empty arms waving.

“Your dad is here,” she says.

You go back to the house you share with some people, smoke a cigarette, eat some peanuts, weed a greenhouse. Stop. You just stop.

You go to the guru’s private garden, because sometimes you weed there. Your father is in the garden, kneeling beside him. The guru speaks into your father’s ear, his hand patting and stroking your father’s shoulder, and you feel a lethal rage, because there you are deadheading his fucking roses, and you have never been touched by him, never touched him, not once.

“Malcolm,” your father shouts.

You sit on the sun-blistered grass together. His nose is smeared with a white strip of sun cream.

Ma is walking up the road toward the guru’s big house.

“See that girl with the shoes on?” you say.

“What made you think it would work with her?” your father asks.

“What makes you think it didn’t?”

“Hah.”

You know he’s thinking that Ma is like your mother. You are both thinking that it has been three years now without her. Neither of you expected it, not of her. Without ever speaking about it, you had both assumed that she would go noisily, in a freak hiking accident or a plane crash. Not with the quietness of a disease already in her brain; not drugged and almost constantly sleeping. Within a week, she could not speak. Before that, wherever she went, tender and trampling through your lives, there was always the sound of bangle against bangle on her wrists.

You look down at your strong, freckled arms, your hands in your lap. You look up at the sky, its blue mottled by clouds.

You don’t ask how your father found you. Your parents always seemed to know someone in every city. The endless dinner parties. The constant chatter and music. You suppose it was only a matter of time. You laugh.

“How’s my cat?”

“She’s dead.”

“He’s dead.”

A warm hand takes your hand, and you think how nice it is, in the end, to be touched by a man like your father. ♦

Your story “This Is How It Happens” revolves around a young Scottish man in the early nineteen-eighties, who is befriended by some followers of Rajneesh and travels to Oregon to join the commune there. The story was inspired in part by the experience of two of your family members. Can you tell me a bit about them and what you borrowed from their lives?

My uncle and my grandmother moved from Scotland to join the Rajneesh commune in Oregon in the nineteen-eighties. I don’t know much about their experience there. It all happened before I was born. What I do remember is a photo my granny had of Osho, the guru, dead and laid out to be viewed. I remember other photos, and her referencing the guru with affection. In a way, it was just part of the fabric of my childhood, and because I was a young child I can’t even vouch for how accurate these memories are. No one ever explained the family ties to the Rajneesh to me. Not because my family wanted to keep me in the dark but because it was just normal for them. Normal doesn’t need an explanation.

It was many years later, when I was in my twenties, that my sister phoned me, and said, “There is a Netflix documentary that explains everything.” That documentary series was “Wild Wild Country.” I found it shocking. For me, the Rajneesh had just been a quirky experience of my family, not the sensationalized cult portrayed onscreen.

I didn’t use my family’s history in “This Is How It Happens,” really, because I still don’t know it completely, and I never will. Some of my family’s stories are so bizarre they would not be believed if I put them in fiction anyway. I also did not want to sensationalize the story. I wanted it to be personal, and small, close to Malcolm, the main character, so that the reader would be present for his intimate experience. So for these reasons, the narrative is my own. The story is an attempt to understand why a person might join a group like the Rajneesh. It’s also about the love I had for my grandmother, and the hole she left when she died. Many people are described as larger than life. She really was larger than life.

The protagonist of your story, Malcolm, is not a natural convert. He’s straitlaced and inexperienced, reeling from the turbulence of his family life and in search of stability. Why is he so easily pulled out of the existence he’s been struggling to establish?

It is funny that you say Malcolm is searching for stability, because he does find it with the Rajneesh, who, to many, would probably be judged as unstable. Malcolm is feeling disconnected from his community and his father, and, without being very conscious of it, is searching for meaning. This is possibly why he adopted a cat. His life is mundane, but, beyond that, he is grieving. The Rajneesh offers him a way to exist in his body that is grounding. They offer physical intimacy, friendship, and a life that is more aligned with nature and with other people. In some ways, I disagree with the term “natural convert,” because I think most of us would be natural converts if a group found us in a state of vulnerability and provided comfort or answers when we needed them.

One thing that has been missing from Malcolm’s life is physical affection from his father. He feels that kind of love from and for the other men at the commune. But again his contact with the paternal figure—the guru—is unfulfilling, impersonal. Is this journey of his, in a way, a quest for a father? Or a better family?

It is my impression that the men of my Scottish grandfather’s generation were not physically affectionate—although I do remember my grandfather giving me a lot of wonderfully beardy kisses on the cheek. My grandfather fought in the Second World War. Understandably, he never talked about it. The story doesn’t reference it directly, but Malcolm’s father is from this generation of men who went to war, many of whom were barely men when they left. For me, Malcolm is trying to heal some of his father’s pain, and by proxy his own, through his relationships with the men at the commune. It was important to me that these relationships remain brotherly and sweet. You are right that the guru’s distance is disappointing, in a way that Malcolm can’t articulate and that reverberates with his relationship with his father. In my mind, although Malcolm is not aware of it, he is searching for a deep human connection. He gets it, to an extent, with the men in the commune, and fleetingly with the women he has sex with. Perhaps also with the children for whom he provides some care, and who are even hungrier for connection than he is. I don’t think the story gives a definitive answer as to whether he will get the lasting intimacy he is seeking. He gets it in short bursts from many people, and in the end, briefly, from his father.

It’s interesting that his own attempts to be paternal—to the cat he adopts—are also rejected, or met with hostility, in a way that feels unjust to Malcolm. Was the cat always a character in the story?

I never planned to have a cat in this story. He just appeared and would not leave. At one point, I attempted to cut him out of the narrative, and the story felt flat, almost without depth or meaning, which is a lot of responsibility to put on one angry cat. Incidentally, Malcolm’s cat is based on one that my sister adopted. This cat grew up in the dodgy Leith highrises. To avoid being scratched, I, like Malcolm, had to take flying leaps from my sister’s bed when I was cat-sitting. We were all fond of this cat, because she engendered so much chat among us. My brother-in-law affectionately called her Feline Hitler.

We know that the commune in Oregon came to an ignominious end. Have you imagined an afterlife for Malcolm?

For me, that final contact between him and his father felt like such relief, such completion, I was incapable of imagining anything beyond it. In that one sober moment of touch, I felt as though I had resolved some of the male struggle with lack of intimacy. I could not possibly move past it, and nor could Malcolm. Yet nothing is really resolved for them, so I wanted to let that moment last, in a way it can only in fiction, never in real life. If I don’t imagine a future, Malcolm can stay in that brief instance of getting what he needs.

You told me that you put off writing this story for a long time. Once you started, did you write it quickly? And what made you choose to write it in the second person and in the present tense?

This story was brewing in me for about five years, but, once I sat down, it took me only a few hours to write the first draft. I always knew that it would be in second person and present tense. I chose present tense to make Malcolm’s experience feel immediate—as much as that is possible in fiction, anyway—to make the reader, and myself, stay present for Malcolm. Second person was a similar choice. I wanted the reader, and myself, to feel entangled. A lot of us judge people who join groups like the Rajneesh, but we all want community and friendship and love and excitement. To me, the Rajneesh encapsulated so much of what seemed free and hopeful about the nineteen-seventies and eighties. A possibility of living differently from the previous generation. I think I would quite likely have joined, and suspect that many readers would have, too.

You’ve written two historical novels—one set in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ireland and one set in the mid-twentieth century. “This Is How It Happens” also takes place before you were born. What is the attraction of setting your fiction in the past?

When I wrote “This Is How It Happens,” I sent it to a writer friend with an e-mail saying, “See, I can write contemporary fiction.” She disillusioned me. The eighties are pretty much as close to the present day as I have ever reached in my prose. I think that what draws me to writing fiction set in the past—aside from my love of history and the power of fiction to allow time travel—is the ability to hide myself. I can pour my rage into a medieval Irish “witch,” as I did in my novel “Bright I Burn,” and no one can accuse me of being shrill. I can immerse myself in research, and imagine day-to-day lives that are wildly different from my own, and not recognize myself in these stories until I am finished. “This Is How It Happens” is probably the closest I have ever come to writing anything that obviously touches my own life, and really my life was only marginally touched by the Rajneesh. Even so, the story feels quite exposing, especially given where I am publishing it, but perhaps this is a sign that I am becoming braver. Perhaps next time I will write a story set in 2026. ♦

Doyers Street is a one-block strip in Chinatown that starts off perpendicular to the Bowery and then curves ninety degrees, like a lowercase “r,” to terminate against the bustle of Pell Street. A notorious battleground for gang fights in the early nineteen-hundreds, it has, in recent decades, scrubbed out the bloodstains and redefined itself as a beloved, city-grid-defying idiosyncrasy, narrow and wonky and overflowing with atmosphere. Shops and restaurants on Doyers come and go, but as far back as the fighting days it’s been anchored by Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which claims to hold the title of New York’s oldest dim-sum spot. Its sign, once a bright burgundy and gold, is faded; the interior has seen better days, and the legendary egg rolls—I say this with love—have, too. But what Nom Wah does best is, simply, remain: it’s the colossus of Doyers Street, the past that has made it into the present.

A new establishment, Lei Wine, opened last June, right next door, and it serves as a potent counterpoint. Modern, sleek, restrained, Lei is the first solo project from the restaurateur Annie Shi, a partner in the chic European-inflected West Village restaurant King and its midtown sibling, Jupiter. Shi, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Queens; she’s spoken about taking inspiration for Lei from her mother’s cooking and her father’s Chinatown social life. With mahogany wall panels and folktale-inspired murals, the restaurant evokes elements of traditional Chinese design, while its moody, candlelit interior and austere tableware (including chopsticks with riveted, bistro-style handholds) place it firmly in the aesthetic of the here and now. High shelves run around the walls in the tiny, table-packed dining room, clustered with bottles from Shi’s meticulously curated wine list; if a customer requests a bottle that’s out of reach, a server might grab a ladder that rests against the wall by the door—fire-engine red, the brightest shock of color in the otherwise low-key room—and climb nimbly over diners’ heads.

A fire-engine-red ladder allows staff members to reach bottles from above diners’ heads.

Lei’s menu is brief and tight, featuring mostly snack-size dishes, both chilled and warm, and two or three larger plates that, while still relatively petite, flirt with the notion of a main course. It is unmistakably Chinese in approach and ingredients, if not necessarily traditionalist in its execution. The kitchen (tiny, all electric, led by the chef Patty Lee, an alumna of Mission Chinese) seems to operate on ambitious principles of beauty and control. The presentation is starkly, artistically minimalist: three tiny bowls of pickles (cucumber, radish, celery); a precise triangle of aged-daikon omelette. Raw celtuce, a lettuce cultivar bred for its sweet stem rather than for its leaves, is cut into neat rectangles of a luminous parakeet green, interleaved with strips of jiggly kombu jelly, and plated atop a vermillion pool of Yongchun red vinegar. An ovoid shao bing—a flaky laminated pastry freckled with sesame seeds—provides a sharp contrast in temperatures: the bun is oven-hot and puffy with steam, the thick slab of butter tucked inside still fridge cold. You can, if you like, get a side of cured lardo, ethereal slivers laid out on a white plate, but the logic of the pairing eludes me: the oily bing and milky slick of butter already form a symphony of richness, and I was happier to eat the lardo on its own, letting each translucent fairy wing of fat melt on my tongue.

Softness and subtlety are recurring motifs, a striking departure from the current trend among modern Chinese restaurants toward forceful, fiery flavors. This can, at times, be a little bit boring: that omelette, for instance, a Taiwanese-informed riff on the tortilla española, was anodyne as baby food, and barely revived by a drizzle of scallion oil. But the kitchen’s quietude can also reveal moments of startling sophistication, as with a scallop crudo under a tangle of dried lily buds, the floral strands musky and tart against the fish’s supple sweetness. Cat’s ear noodles, toothsome little swoops of fresh dough, are tossed in a northern-Chinese-inspired ragout of braised lamb that’s scented oh-so-gently with cumin. A little pile of three bite-size pieces of zhū xiě gāo—a chewy Taiwanese black sausage made with pig’s blood and sticky rice—looks like nearly nothing, the exteriors coated to a bland beigeness in crushed peanuts, but it’s maybe the boldest dish on the menu, its mochi-like savoriness shot through with a sharp, controlled flare of heat.

If you go to Lei looking for dinner, this parade of composure might not send you into raptures. But Lei isn’t really a restaurant; it is, quite pointedly, a wine bar, and it’s at its best when you approach it as one. It would be ideal to drop by for a nightcap after a meal somewhere nearby—a solo bowl of noodles at Maxi’s, or a riotous group dinner at Uncle Lou—to close the evening with a glass of bubbly and Lei’s zingy multi-citrus shaved-ice parfait, one of only two desserts on the menu. Shi’s bottle list encompasses an idiosyncratic mix of classics and oddballs, including stroppy Austrian natural whites alongside multi-thousand-dollar Burgundies, funky low-intervention oranges from Greece, a few bottles from the Japanese winery Coco Farm. The by-the-glass list skews a little less adventurous, with crowd-pleasing, apple-juicy pours—I was disappointed not to see any Chinese options, despite some on the bottle list—but the staff regularly opens interesting offerings from the bottle list that you might catch a pour of. One evening, I was lucky to try a glass of a thrilling Portuguese white (the 2022 Malvarinto de Janas, from the Sintra-based producer Quinta de San Michel) that was muscular and gravelly, with surprising notes of coconut. It’s the sort of wine you don’t usually end up drinking, unless someone who really knows her stuff is running the show. Moreover, it’s the sort of wine that is set off, so prettily, so evocatively, by food that’s confident enough to speak quietly, and share the stage. ♦

A citrus shaved-ice parfait is one of only two desserts on the menu.